"The environment seemed to make everyone adopt this crazed animalistic nature" --Tianjin Electric Castle Party attendee
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Did hundreds, possibly thousands of expats — including promoters Street Hustle Promotions, ticketing agency Send Me Tickets, and local magazines — get swindled by organizers of the worst China party of the year?

We at Beijing Cream do not actively condone buffoonery, excessive alcohol intake, or buffoonery as the result of excessive alcohol intake, but understand we are surrounded by all of the above anyway -- and that it can be fun. And so it's with no small amount of ambivalence that we announce: this Friday, November 1, revelers in Halloween costumes will be gathering around 9 pm (+30 minutes or so) at Dongzhimen Subway Station and riding south on Line 2 for this year's official Halloween Subway Party. BYOB.

This week's podcast was recorded at the Bookworm on Wednesday for the Literary Death Match, hosted by Adrian Todd Zuniga, featuring the four readers/competitors Leslie Ann Murray, Tom Carter, Stanley Chan, and Anthony Tao, and the judges Alice Xin Liu, Vicky Mohieddeen, and Sherwin Jiang.

The hottest ticket in town will be the one to see Dr. Dre and LeBron James at Spark this Saturday. How do you get tickets? No idea. They're probably not going to be publicly available. (Maybe. Who knows.) But there are giveaways and such on the table, beginning with the one advertised by That's Beijing, who's got itself quite the bona fide expat-mag scoop...

Occasionally in showbusiness or sports, the odds against a performer's success are so stacked that the audience chooses, out of the goodness of human compassion, to root against probability. It's why we pull for Celtic FC when they face Barcelona, or Susan Boyle. I hadn't planned to cheer for the pageant contestants of Miss World China on Sunday at Galaxy SOHO -- hadn't not planned to cheer, as planning these things one way or another would be odd -- but a realization dawned upon me sometime between the rain and the fake applause piped in through the sound system: these girls are all underdogs in their own spotlight. They deserve better.

The inaugural Color Punch party, organized by Street Kids and Let There Be House, happened on June 15 at Dos Kolegas, and we're still trying to fathom all that drunken gaiety amidst organized lechery. What profligate uncoiling, the body's gasconade against the screwed-up walls of youth. And afterwards, how many more spilled additional colors in a final exhortation of spirit?

I spent my last 30 minutes at the 2nd annual Beijing Craft Beer Festival sitting behind a desk under the LGBT Resource Center tent handing out fliers and chatting with curious Chinese onlookers and expats happy to see the table. (How drunk was I? You decide.) Ni hao, women shi Beijing TongZhi ZhongXin, we announced to a curious child and his semi-interested mother. Her eyes snapped to a rainbow-patterned poster, then to the two smiling foreigners sitting in front of her. With the speed and grace of a defensive tackle scooping up a fumble, lady disappeared with child.
Not a minute later, a separate young mother had her two daughters each put 10 kuai into the donations box. Scurrying and donating -- it was like that all evening, and the organizers were just fine with that.

BJC reader Phoebe sends this preliminary report from this past weekend's Craft Beer Festival at Galaxy Soho:
A bratty five-year-old looking kid yelled "wo yao niao niao!" at his parents who immediately picked him up, pulled his pants down and held him over a bin, a foot away from where we were eating and drinking. The father laughed as I took photos and told him how disgusting it is and that there is a bathroom right through the door behind him. His response: "My kid doesn't like bathrooms, he's afraid."

Carl Setzer, owner of Great Leap Brewing -- one of the primary organizers of the Craft Beer Festival on Friday and Saturday at Galaxy Soho -- has informed us that Galaxy Soho is now allowing the Beijing LGBT Center to have an official presence at the second annual Craft Beer Festival this Friday and Saturday.
Two days ago, That's Beijing reported that SOHO sent a message to the organizers of the beer festival that the LGBT Center was not welcome at the event because they "clashed with the architecture." That statement was apparently "the result of one bigoted mid-level manager," Setzer told us over email.

That's Beijing dropped a bombshell yesterday, reporting that Galaxy Soho's management apparently doesn't want the city's LGBT Center to have an official presence at the Craft Beer Festival this Friday and Saturday. Specifically:
After (beer festival organizers) submitt[ed] their festival proposal – which included a description of a LGBT Center booth to the Galaxy Soho management, they were informed that the Center’s representatives would not be allowed access to the venue’s premises, over concerns that LGBT members would not fit with the the site’s architecture ("和我们的建筑 不太吻合").

Last week I got an invite to roll with some musician buddies up at Midi Festival and decided it’d be a great opportunity to grab a camera and capture the people and fashions that only “the biggest rock festival” in China can provide.
Undeterred by the lack of a fucking functional website, the promise of awe-inspiring traffic, and the threat of hours of shitty metal, I took a whiskey-soaked ride up to the Beijing Yuyang International Ski Resort and brought back photos from the Pulp Fiction/Sid and Nancy/The Last Waltz/skate video some kids from Ohio would make/Betty Boop/Hot Topic Lookbook fever dream that was Midi Festival 2013.

BJC contributor Chris Clayman attended the Dali Erhai World Music Festival in Yunnan province from April 29 – May 1. His dispatch follows. A Cop with a Weird Haircut We’re standing near the fortune teller when Lin Dan shows us something. “I’m a cop,” he says. He pulls out his wallet and holds it close to... Read more »

Like the most quintessential of Americana, chili is not complex — a stew of beans and tomatos, ingredients that fill the stomach, kick the tongue — yet it’s only with such a square, hearty base that we can sign our culinary art into the slight variances that elevate mere provision into the estimable domain of... Read more »

One thing I learned about getting invited to a the Beijinger awards ceremony is you first have to leave Beijing. During my four-year tenure here, I never received an invite. Just three months after I made the move to Hangzhou, I was chosen to be an official nominator. Sure, why not. Months later, as an... Read more »

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight for the Beijinger’s Super Quiz to benefit Ping An Medical Foster Home. The event raised 28,000 yuan last year, and I’m sure the Beijinger will be around soon to tell you how we did this time around. Congratulations to the winners, Girls with Low Self-Esteem, pictured above (host Jonathan White... Read more »

The Caochangdi branch of Beijing Design Week is an eclectic mess. The posters have the wrong dates. Designers didn't finish their work on time, so you'll find empty spaces in the place of installations. Volunteers might sell you a button or a program that's supposed to be free. You'll wonder what some exhibits, such as a mishmash of geolocation balloons and a physical "chat room" called "The Real Network," have to do with design.
Mix it all together, and you have a wonderful template for the best and worst of Beijing.

The Beijinger's New Festival Showcase at 2 Kolegas on Saturday mostly proved to be your standard gathering of drunken expats, except it produced one hell of a musical highlight: Residence A, a Beijing staple we featured in an Outro earlier this month, giving what I thought was the performance of the night around 8:30 pm. Reasonable music fans will disagree, and I admit I didn't catch every act, but the energy was noticeably different with these guys on stage, to say nothing of musical phrasing and general ability.

China has been abuzz over orgies recently, thanks to a set of scandalous pictures that surfaced last week featuring three pairs of swingers. (You can see several of these 120-some NSFW photos here.) Amid speculation (since dispelled) that the men were high-ranking government officials, one of the men, Wang Yu, confessed to being in the... Read more »